Nauvoo's Prospects On Rise With Mormons' Temple Plans

NAUVOO, Ill. — The leading attraction in this riverfront town of 1,200 is a meticulously landscaped, historically significant, theologically momentous hole in the ground.

The rectangular depression, marked with a smattering of rough stones, draws an estimated 200,000 visitors a year from around the country and abroad.

It is surrounded by three competing visitors centers, each representing its own religious tradition. It is at the center of local political squabbles and economic hopes, the hub of Nauvoo's peculiar past and its hopes for the future.

Now, following a surprise Easter announcement, this grassy plot is fueling excited speculation throughout one of the world's fastest-growing churches: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints plans to rebuild the Nauvoo Temple, the monumental limestone edifice that briefly towered over a 19th Century theocracy on the banks of the Mississippi.

Church leaders, who have not announced a timetable for the project, say the new temple will be built on the same site, with local material, and will closely resemble the original on the exterior. Inside, it will be a modern, functioning Mormon temple.

By the time the massive new temple throws its shadow over the town's current tallest structure, the water tower, church leaders anticipate seeing as many as 1 million visitors a year.

Local real estate agents say they have been flooded with calls from Utah since the announcement, as Mormon retirees consider relocating to Nauvoo--a town nearly 100 miles downriver of the Quad Cities.

Even as some townspeople worry about the loss of their quiet, intimate community, the growing Mormon population--about 150 permanent residents, plus another 150 temporary church workers and missionaries--is ecstatic.

In Mormon memory, Nauvoo stands for the first full blossom of the temple-based religion that now claims more than 10 million members. Founder and first prophet Joseph Smith Jr. already had revealed the Book of Mormon, the scripture that fundamentally distinguishes the faith from mainstream Christianity--but here the church developed much of its theology, took on its lasting structure and initiated the secret rites of the temple that became central to practicing the faith.

Here, too, the church suffered its darkest moments of persecution.

Built between 1841 and 1846, the Nauvoo temple was completed a year after Smith had been murdered by an angry mob and dedicated even as some 20,000 of his followers began to flee the town in fear of their lives.

The original temple building, in its day one of Illinois' largest structures, was destroyed by fire in 1847, apparently set by a detractor who wanted to make sure the Mormons did not return to Nauvoo.

But for the last 30 years, the Salt Lake City-based church has been buying up property in Nauvoo, transforming a tiny farm town into what tourism brochures call "the Williamsburg of the West."

Thomas Wilson, a farmer who was born and raised in Nauvoo, and now serves as its mayor, said, "I figured some day it would happen."

"The buses aggravate my wife, but I tell her, just shut the windows and turn on the air conditioning," he said. " . . . I get along with the Mormons just fine.

"You've got to have some kind of industry, and that's our industry. If they hadn't come back, we might be like a lot of other Midwestern towns--dried up."

At the other end of town, at the Nauvoo Family Motel, the temple announcement was both a spiritual and economic blessing.

Five years ago Kay Walker, a descendent of a Mormon family driven from Nauvoo in the 1840s, quit his job as a broker in St. Louis and moved to Nauvoo to take over the struggling motel. Last fall, he persuaded a local bank to lend money for a huge expansion, nearly doubling the size of the motel to 123 rooms.

"I had many people telling me that doing this addition, we would go out of business. We were being too aggressive," Walker remembered.

"There have been a lot of big things, big ideas in Nauvoo that have never happened," he said. "The difference is, this is being done by the church. If the church announces it, it will be done."

That was the attitude in 1839, when Joseph Smith and his beleaguered band of followers decided to abandon their "Zion" in Missouri, where they had been engaged in open warfare with ad hoc militias that did not like the upstart religion.

After a brief stint in a Missouri jail, Smith crossed the Mississippi and made his way upriver until he found a swampy piece of land that met his two primary criteria: It was big enough to contain the new temple city he envisioned; and it was available.

Within two years, Smith and a core of Mormons had drained most of the low land and set about building a city from the ground up. Thousands of Mormons were pouring in from Missouri and Ohio, as well as a steady stream of converts direct from Europe.